The end of deep coal mining in Britain: ‘They’ve knocked us down’

After surviving Margaret Thatcher and myriad strikes, the closure of the Kellingley colliery heralds the end of the British coal mining industry. Taking with it decades of camaraderie and history, this local tragedy is shrouding Yorkshire in sadness

‘We didn’t think it was good to mark the end of the industry – you only celebrate a victory, don’t you?’ … miners at Kellingley Colliery.
Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

“It could be me and 10 others, or we could be 300, it’s always hard to know with a march,” says Chris Kitchen, secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). But Keith Poulson, the union’s branch secretary at Kellingley colliery in north Yorkshire – whose closure later this month is the reason for the gathering planned for 19 December – is thinking bigger. He believes that as many as 2,000 people could attend, “because it’s the last deep coal mine”. He expects a media scrum along with miners and their families, and says: “You won’t be able to move for TV crews on the verge out there. If we’d only had as much attention when we were trying to keep the place open, then it might have been a different tale we’re telling now.”

There is so much bitterness here that the Kellingley miners rejected an offer by management to lay on a buffet and a brass band to mark their last day at work. Then, at a 40th birthday party a few weeks ago, two women whose partners are among the 451 men still working at Kellingley decided they would arrange something. They fixed on a march modelled on one held in January, when the local Labour and Conservative MPs Yvette Cooper and Nigel Adams joined calls for the mine – which is in Adams’ constituency but so close to Cooper’s that she, too, is heavily involved – to be saved.

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Led by the Knottingley Silver Band, and with NUM officials carrying the branch banner, the marchers will process the short distance from Knottingley town hall to the Miners’ Social Club. Tickets are on sale for an event later that evening, billed as “The Last Pit Party” on the poster pinned up in the concourse where the miners clock in and out, and where staff from Jobcentre Plus have set up a temporary surgery to offer advice.

Poulson respected union members’ wishes when he agreed that they would just walk away after the final shift. “We didn’t think it was good to mark the end of the industry – you only celebrate a victory, don’t you?” he says. But now the two women have taken the initiative, he says he’s glad. “Their energy is commendable,” he adds.

Most of the miners I spoke to at Kellingley this week seemed to think they would join the march – although there were plenty who declined to talk to the handful of journalists allowed in, along with a documentary film crew, to have a look around before the last of more than 50 Yorkshire coal mines is shut. Alan Clasper, a welder, says he hopes the farewells “will be upbeat, though people will be feeling disappointed. Everyone sticks together, don’t they?”

Employment prospects are grim for this ageing workforce, some of whom have worked in mines since their teens. A good number had fathers and grandfathers who were miners, and they now face little choice but to apply for unskilled warehouse and driving jobs. A notice invites applications to the new wind-turbine factory in Hull, while pointing out that 1,000 applications were received for 14 jobs. Asked if they have enjoyed working at Kellingley, the men say they will miss the camaraderie, and there is bravado as well as anger among a group who list those they hold responsible – Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair – before one tries a joke: “We’re all off on gap years, aren’t we?”

‘Up this end of the world it’s always been mining’ … 451 jobs will go as Kellingley closes. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

For those closest to retirement, the prospects are better, though Poulson, who is 55, will take away just £13,000 in redundancy pay after 39 years. “I’m hoping the young ’uns do get lucky,” says Andy Anderson, 60, who works in the medical centre. “My son is 27, he’s got a daughter and his wife’s pregnant. When he started here two years ago they told him he’d got 10 years’ work. The young men, with kids and mortgages, they’re not going to have the chance to earn the same money again.” This is the last of several waves of redundancy here: 205 men left in July, and 160 last year. Pay ranges from £30,000 to three times that for men working underground, with bonuses and overtime.

From the yard, between the two mine shafts and the conveyor belts leading to the buildings where the coal is washed and loaded on to trains, the eight huge chimneys of Eggborough coal-fired power station are clearly visible. Less than four miles in the other direction is Ferrybridge. Both are set to close next year, long before the government’s recently announced deadline for coal-fired power stations of 2025.

For decades, this corner of Yorkshire has been a vital source of electricity, but asked whether people know what is about to happen here, the unanimous answer is “no”. “You live in London. Go and ask your next-door neighbour if they think there’s any deep mines left in Britain,” Poulson tells me.

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“Everyone thinks mining is already finished,” says Margaret Faull, who recently retired as director of the National Coal Mining Museum after almost 30 years. Colliery manager Shaun McLoughlin, sitting behind the desk in his office, and cable bolter Tony Chappell, in a high-vis jacket covered in black dust, tell versions of the same story: when you go on holiday and get into conversation, people can’t believe you work in a mine. “They don’t know that up this end of the world it’s always been mining,” says Chappell, who is 53.

No one denies British coal is expensive. Labour costs, safety standards, and issues with this mine including the three hours a day miners spend travelling underground, are among the reasons – and a contract with Drax power station is the only reason Kellingley can sell what it currently produces.

Local MP Nigel Adams says, “The closure of Kellingley is a tragedy for everyone who works there,” and blames “successive governments’ decarbonisation policies along with cheaper coal imports”, while a spokesperson for energy secretary Amber Rudd cites the “significant role in our energy history” played by Kellingley and looks ahead to “opportunities” in nuclear and gas. McLoughlin says that, as far as politics are concerned, “Everything’s on the back of the environmentalists.”

Since the Labour governments of 1997-2010 continued with the pit closures begun by the Conservatives, he doesn’t think the historic antipathy between the NUM and the Conservative party, the strikes of 1972-74 that brought down Edward Heath, or the 1984-85 strike, have much to do with what is happening now. Faull agrees, points to the closure of mines in Belgium and elsewhere as evidence of a wider trend, and believes coal’s reputation as dirty and polluting explains its loss of support.

Kellingley’s closure is ‘sad but inevitable’, according to Margaret Faull, former director of the National Coal Mining Museum. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Coal continues to provide around a quarter of British electricity, and many are sceptical about plans to replace it. But even if the government does stick to its timetable, millions of tons of coal will be imported for the next 10 years. McLoughlin says price projections make it clear British coal would remain uncompetitive, but the miners take a different view, citing the billions of pounds of government subsidies and guarantees for the Hinkley Point nuclear power station, along with support for renewables, as evidence of bias against them. They are angry, too, about the profits made by energy companies since privatisation.

“They’ve knocked us down and down and down,” says Poulson. “You could understand we’d have to close if there was no market, but we’re seven miles from Drax, the biggest coal-fired power station in Europe.”

“This country used to be called Great Britain and coal is part of what put ‘Great’ into that name,” says Kitchen. “When you see what has been done for others, it makes you wonder if this is anything to do with climate change, or even economics, or if it is purely a political stance: ‘Thirty years ago we wanted to kill off the mining industry and this year we’ve finally got the chance.’”

In a few weeks’ time, the only deep mine left will be Caphouse, England’s National Coal Mining Museum. I was taken on the underground tour there by former miner John Carrington, who told me how, at busy times, he gets stuck behind men his age pausing in the tunnels to tell their grandchildren their life stories. The museum’s visitor numbers are up this year, though funding is difficult.

Carrington was a locomotive foreman before he became a guide, and he has his eye on one of Kellingley’s locomotives as an addition to the collection. Already agreed is the removal to the museum – from its current spot beside the car park, where it can be seen from the canteen – of the Kellingley memorial, a bronze frieze of a bare-chested miner for which the men raised £26,000 following the death of one of their number, Don Cook, in 2008. His was one of three deaths at the mine in the past nine years.

At the NUM’s headquarters in Barnsley, the brightly painted banners of closed collieries hang from every wall of the council chamber, which is currently being used for rehearsals of a pantomime. “Some people think we’ll become a museum,” says Kitchen, though he is determined to prevent that. In a few weeks, the future of the union – which will see its membership fall to around 400 open-cast mine and rescue workers after Kellingley’s closure – will be debated.

When I visited her at home in Wakefield, Faull was unemotional about Kellingley’s closure, calling it “sad but inevitable”. She was in no doubt about coal’s significance in British history, pointing to the country’s reliance on it over three centuries, but said that, as a historian, she views it dispassionately. She believes the decisions that doomed coal were taken decades ago, when a pre-privatisation National Coal Board programme of fluidised bed burning was cancelled and development of small-scale boilers abandoned. “The NCB was not focused enough on the future,” she says. “They took the view there would always be the need for coal. They were used to selling large-scale to power stations, and they saw marketing as negotiating how much they would get per ton.”

Last month, the UK government cancelled its £1bn competition for the carbon capture and storage technology that could yet provide a future for coal globally. There are plans to open a new, community-owned drift mine less than 10 miles from the Caphouse museum. But no one seems to doubt that this is the end of deep coal mining in Britain. After mechanical problems last week, work is two days behind schedule at Kellingley, meaning miners may now be asked to work on 19 December, when they might otherwise have been marching to mark the end of their way of life.

This article was amended on 7 December 2015 to clarify that the event on 19 December is a farewell march for the miners, their families and supporters, but not a demonstration.